


assist the storm

by belovedmuerto



Series: An Experiment in Apathy [7]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Baskerville - Freeform, EiE, Experiments, Gen, M/M, Trauma, eia, empath!John, experiment in apathy, experiment in empathy, secondary trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-14
Updated: 2012-11-14
Packaged: 2017-11-18 16:00:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/562821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belovedmuerto/pseuds/belovedmuerto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John has gone off to Baskerville at Mycroft's behest. Sherlock has gone off after him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	assist the storm

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry, I'm terrible at summaries. 
> 
> As always, thanks to Castiron for the beta. You're awesome. Thanks to everyone else who has done mass amounts of hand-holding or else listening to me bitch. You're all superiorly kind folks.
> 
> Also, if you're into podfics, Otter has started podficcing the Experiment in Empathy series! So far, the first two stories have been posted; there are links in the stories that'll lead you to her podfics.

John dreams, and dreams, and dreams. He is caught in his dreams, waking and sleeping, trapped by them, in them. He is consumed by them, burned raw by them, soothed by them only to be devoured anew, burnt and healed, burnt and healed.

He spends long hours in an isolation tank, surrounded by water, drowned in pitch black darkness, sound dulled to the thump of his own heart, loud in his ears, left with only his dreams to comfort him, little comfort that they are.

Sometimes, the dreams are good. His Gran comes to him. She hugs him, as she did when he was a little boy and had some little boy’s hurt that needed to be soothed. She hugs him, as she did when he was a little boy and could barely shoulder the weight of the hurt his peculiarity inflicted upon him. She hugs him and smiles at him, tells him fairy tales to distract him, fantasies and adventures, to draw him out of his own head and away from the pain of the world.

But she never stays.

Often, she is washed away by someone else in the facility, by some trivial event in someone’s life that is causing them a normal amount of emotional upheaval that becomes all-encompassing in his mind, reflected and refracted and bouncing around his head. It’s the same people going through the same things day after day, the hardy folks, the ones who have stayed around.

Most of them are gone now. Were gone by the end of the day Tuesday. Paid leaves of absence authorized at the highest level for all of them. John hadn’t really given it thought, but he’s not even a tiny bit surprised that he has driven them all away; he drives everyone away.

Apparently, he’d spent Tuesday making everyone in the facility cry for the whole afternoon.

He hadn’t meant to, really he hadn’t. Alone in the isolation tank, though, things are different. He’d thought it safe, at first, safe to let go, to allow himself a bit of a release. But being in isolation, all of his other senses dampened by muffles, by plugs, by the water and the darkness, his empathy goes haywire. It kicks into high gear when everything else is dulled, as he knew it would, as they knew it would. Why he’d deluded himself into thinking it safe to let go for even a minute is beyond him. Stupid, stupid.

There’s rarely a thoroughly-stated purpose to it, though, unlike the time he’s spent in an isolation tank before. He’s always hooked up to monitors of various sorts, so he knows they’re watching, gathering data, always gathering data, and he tries to keep his control, but it’s hard. But the first few days, they simply put him in there and leave him, for eternities at a time.

He feels like solar flares, like his empathy is erupting from his head, sweeping in wide arcs out from him and then back, bringing back everything emotional in a wide radius and pounding it into his head, pounding, pounding, making it impossible to think. 

John has been careful since then, to keep his projecting to a minimum, except when he is made to project, so they can measure whatever it is they’re measuring. Which is most afternoons, after that first couple of days. So his intentions have mostly been for naught. Even so, despite his trying, he hasn’t been able to completely curb it, not with his own head such a mess. Not after he’d agreed to drop his shields totally.

He’s had a headache ever since. Even with the skeleton crew in the facility, his head pounds with the collective emotionality of the people surrounding him. His head pounds _all the time_. The only time he can get around it is when he’s in here, isolated. Surrounded by the peace and the quiet, before his empathy has gone haywire again. He can tune them out, sometimes; he can go wandering. He can expand himself far beyond his normal range.

He can reach Sherlock, almost. Feel him there, at least. And despite knowing Sherlock must be so angry with him, it is still a comfort, knowing he’s there, just out of reach, no longer being hurt constantly by John.

It’s a comfort... except when it’s not.

When he sleeps, his dreams are less than pleasant. Sebastian Moran walks in his head. He smiles a smug smile, a snake-like, insane grin. He puts on Sherlock like an expensive suit, settling in, getting even deeper into John’s head--”Oh, so this is how it feels,” and he shudders in pleasure, wearing Sherlock--and he does things, awful things to John, wearing Sherlock all the while, smiling at him with Sherlock’s lips, speaking to him with Sherlock’s voice, but looking at him with his own eyes.

John never seems to wake from these dreams until it is far, far too late.

When he’s not playing at the glorified lab rat, he goes for walks. Sometimes he goes to the village, has a pint at the local, but more often he simply wanders the moor. It’s stark and strangely beautiful here, especially at dusk. It’s lonely and perhaps a bit spooky. Sometimes he hears distant gunfire. He walks far enough that he can’t feel the people in Baskerville anymore; sometimes he lies down on the ground and simply stares at the sky until he has to go back.

\----

It’s been a week now.

The first day, after the train and the car, with Anthea there giving him knowing looks and plucking thoughts out of his head--he knows she is, he can feel it, even though she doesn’t say anything to him, not a single word--there had been a tour of the facility. It’s a big manor house, formerly someone’s home, which makes him vaguely uncomfortable. It would’ve supported the the nearby village, back in its heyday. After that, the doctor in charge of his... of him, Stapleton, had gone over the procedures she had planned with him. There were... a lot of them. 

Her bedside manner sucks, but John nearly appreciates that. He doesn’t want to be coddled, he doesn’t want sympathy and pitying looks. He wants to be ripped limb from limb, and put back together again, maybe. He’s not sure his goals match theirs--their goals had been outlined in the proposal Mycroft had given him ages ago, but he’d only skimmed that. (The look in Dr. Stapleton’s eyes when they’re first speaking, that unholy look of glee, says to him that her goals, despite the things she’s saying to him, might more closely match his than the official line.) (He’s not entirely sure he likes that.)

His first full day, Sunday, is filled with the mundane tests: a CT scan, an MRI, a PET scan. They hook him up to an EKG machine and then an EEG. They poke and prod him, measure everything they can think of and even a few things he doesn’t immediately recognize. He doesn’t question those things; he doesn’t really care.

John is exhausted by the time they say they’re finished with him, and increasingly unnerved by the way Stapleton looks at him, like he is nothing more than a lab rat, than a brain in a jar for her to poke at and play with, like she’s going to have her vaguely creepy way with him and enjoy every minute piece of data she gets out of it.

She reminds him a bit of Sherlock when he’s got the light of a new experiment in his eyes. Only her eyes aren’t as nice. And he doesn’t like her the way he likes Sherlock.

He hadn’t expected to miss Sherlock this much this quickly.

It’s strangely reassuring, all of it together, despite the ache of homesickness.

He’s given a small room in the wing of the old house where those few that live here sleep, a bare room with not much more than a narrow bed, a tiny wardrobe and a nightstand. It reminds him of before he was sent home from Afghanistan. It makes him ache in an unfamiliar way.

They explain, the next morning, before he’s had any coffee or even a cup of tea--barbarians--that he needs to explain how he wards himself, how he keeps the emotions of those surrounding him from driving him mad. They show him what little data they have on other empaths (none on his mum, thank god), and make plain the reality that most empaths don’t live past 25, and those that do rarely make it past 30 before committing suicide. A lot of them don’t make it out of puberty before taking their own lives. 

After that they inform him that he needs to drop his shields. They tell him why, that it interferes with their tests, with the measurements, and after that he acquiesces with a sinking heart. They want to know what makes him tick. They want to know what makes him so special, that he’s nearing forty and is so well-adjusted and not-suicidal. 

_Well-adjusted? Me? That’s a laugh,_ he thinks. 

Anthea is there for that meeting, mysteriously, but she helps him find the words for the concepts that are so ingrained for him that he doesn’t even think about them. She helps him give them voice. It’s odd, her helpfulness. She disappears again after, though.

Neither of them, however, mentions his ability to make a thought toll. He’s grateful. He doesn’t know why she keeps that to herself, but he’s grateful nonetheless.

He doesn’t know why he’s made it so much further than other empaths. He doesn’t know what makes him so special.

John resists the idea of making himself totally vulnerable to the emotions of everyone around him at first, but by mid-afternoon, after they’ve explained and explained and showed him how his shields mess up their calculations, he finds himself sat alone in a room in a comfortable armchair (not _his_ armchair; he’s homesick), carefully dismantling his wall, keeping notes as he goes so he’ll be able to put it back together again with, perhaps, not quite as much work as the last time he had to completely rebuild.

Everything pretty much goes to shit after that.

Not that he’d expected any better.

First, they re-do all of the brain scans. They take forever, or at least it feels that way. Everything feels much more immediate, much more painful, with no shields between him and the rest of the people in the facility. Then they start asking questions. They want him to quantify his limits. They want him to remember when his peculiarity first manifested, how he learned to control it, how he learned to shield. 

They pick him to pieces, and expect him to gather those pieces up each night and cobble them into a whole, into himself, into something capable of civilized conversation at dinner, only to pick him apart again the next morning.

By Tuesday, the headache, the pain of it, is pretty much constant, with the onslaught from all the people, with the lack of shielding. Dr. Stapleton watches, is always watching, assessing him, looking at the pain around his eyes, that tightness around them, that he knows is there but cannot banish, because he is in pain, and it _hurts_.

He cries himself to sleep that night, after making the whole facility cry all afternoon, after most of them have fled. Mostly he cries because of the pain in his head. Partly he cries because of the emotional pain, the empathic pain.

Wednesday, he wakes up groggy. 

The day doesn’t go up from there. He never truly wakes up. He crawls through the day feeling as though he’s moving at half-speed, or less.

Thursday and Friday are a blur. He knows there are more tests and more exercises, and he goes for walks in the evenings, around the grounds and out onto the moor, as far away as he can get, but none of these things sticks with him. His brain is too raw, one giant exposed nerve, too red and screaming in pain to retain anything.

Stapleton looks pretty delighted, and feels triumphant, by the time he emerges from the isolation tank on Friday, begs off dinner, and goes straight to bed. He knows she’s been affected by his wild flares of empathy, just like everyone else, but it doesn’t seem to stick with her the way it has stuck with others; she almost seems to relish it.

On Saturday, John wakes up irritated and still in pain. He lays in the uncomfortable and narrow bed for long minutes before rising, fighting with himself against the desire to simply turn over and shut his eyes, and shut out the whole facility until they drag him out of bed.

But that’s not the sort of patient he is. He won’t do that.

He goes through the motions of being a normal person and not an elaborate experiment in prolonged psychological torture with a grim smile, wondering if overwriting trauma--and he’s self-aware enough that he’ll allow the word trauma for the last several months, fucking Moran, fuck him--with self-inflicted trauma and emotional exhaustion is really for the best.

But at least he’s not hurting Sherlock anymore. That much is good.

No one is getting the last laugh over this, not even Dr. Stapleton. They’re all heavily affected. Because everyone is feeling things almost as keenly as he is.

\----

John is dragging his feet after lunch. He is still irritated, while feeling that strange sense of trepidation mixed with elation that’s been with him all day, and he has an afternoon in the tank scheduled. He knows that’s not what’s causing those feelings. John doesn’t know yet what they’re going to ask him to do, but it probably won’t be pleasant, for himself or for anyone else in the surrounding area.

He’s crossing through one of the mostly-empty labs when he sees Sherlock.

_Oh._ That’s where that trepidation and elation are coming from. From him, because he’s here. 

He’s _finally_ here.

John breathes a sigh, of relief, of resignation, of everything. His own elation mixes with Sherlock’s, with a sense of inevitability and fear that he’s going to go right back to hurting this man, his best friend, his... well, whatever he is. Everything? 

Sherlock is talking to Corporal Lyons; he appears to be on something of a tour. Lyons is doing his best not to grin at the detective, a fact John knows mostly because of the spikes of amusement pricking at his brain from the young man. Sherlock’s in disguise--probably as his brother, a man everyone here has met at some point or another--and is laying it on pretty thick. 

John changes direction, crossing the room to the two of them.

Sherlock pretends not to know who John is, holding out a hand and smiling his most smarm-filled smile. “Oh, hello, I’m--”

“Sherlock,” John cuts him off. “They’re humoring you. All of them. They’ve known you’d be here since Monday. Your brother told them. You know, the one they’ve all met before because this whole facility is Mycroft’s pet project.”

Sherlock’s hand drops back to his side. He glances at Corporal Lyons, who has the sense to look somewhat abashed, and then back to John, dismissing the young man completely. Lyons watches for a brief second, and then makes himself scarce. Smart kid. 

“John--”

“Not now, Sherlock, I’m late for an afternoon of inflicting pain on unsuspecting townspeople.”

John continues through the lab, not looking back once. He doesn’t need to look back to know the incredulous expression on Sherlock’s face. He can feel it, all along his back, all along the raw places that used to be his brain.

The afternoon goes by incredibly slowly.

\----

John expects to find Sherlock waiting for him when he emerges from the isolation tank late that afternoon, raw and shivering and quickly covered in goosebumps. But Sherlock is not around.

Nor is Sherlock in the dining room, which is John’s next stop. He might linger over his dinner longer than usual, despite his discomfort. Trepidation. Worry. Anger. Elation. Homesickness. Unease. He can’t parse them, he can’t tell what’s his and what’s Sherlock’s; they all swirl about in his too-sensitive mind.

Corporal Lyons sits across from him as he’s finishing his glass of water and his pudding. John is longing for a good cuppa, but a) the tea in this place is atrocious, mass-brewed shit; and b) it’s far too late for caffeine; he has enough trouble sleeping here (so far from home, from his own bed, from Sherlock). The young man briefs him on what has happened with Sherlock that afternoon while John was otherwise occupied: a tour of the facility, and he’d been shown to his room. He implies that Sherlock was left to his own devices after that, but John knows he was watched, at least from afar, and assessed in some way, surely. That is what they do here. Lyons is very obviously nearly as fascinated with Sherlock as he is with John, and his fascination is grating to John, against his raw, exposed nerves, even more overly sensitive just now, so soon after emerging from the isolation tank.

He excuses himself eventually, when the rawness in his head outweighs the desire to avoid confrontation with Sherlock, and walks through the quiet halls to his room. 

Which is where Sherlock is, of course, sat crossways on his bed, legs crossed at the ankle, coat draped across the end of the bed, reading John’s book, making notes in the margins, apparently, based on the pen in his hand. John stands just inside the door, utterly at a loss as for something to say. What should he say? What can he say?

“John,” Sherlock breathes, and there is a world in that breath. He looks John over, one long look, inside and out.

John sighs and hangs his head.

Sherlock puts the book aside and rises, making John look up in surprise.

“We’ll talk tomorrow,” Sherlock says with a nod. His voice is flat, devoid of inflection or emotion. “Good night, John.”

And John flinches. This is why he’d come here, to stop hurting Sherlock, and how here he is doing it all over again. He’s making it worse, simply by being here, by having done this, by running away, by being traumatized in the first place, and by making Sherlock feel like he had to follow after John. Sherlock shouldn’t have felt like that. He should’ve explained better, he should’ve made Sherlock understand.

Sherlock grabs his coat from its spot on the bed and faces John again, draping it over his arm. His face is a mask, like his voice had been, but underneath it, he feels... calm. Mostly. Still that bit of trepidation ( _ah, that had been more him than me,_ John thinks). There’s anger there, but surprisingly little of it, all things considered. 

John flinches again, hunches his shoulders against all of it, closes his eyes, in defeat, in resignation. He feels Sherlock move around him, close, but not close enough to touch, not quite. John remains still, where he is, hunched in on himself, hears the door click shut behind Sherlock, not slammed, just shut. He hears the door to the next room over open--obvious that they put Sherlock next to him--and then click shut.

\----

Sherlock hadn’t locked his door.

John breathes a sigh of relief--not a rejection, as he’d feared, Sherlock isn’t shutting him out, thank god, maybe he will get through this without destroying them both after all.

He’d waited, and waited, and waited, interminable waiting, fidgeting and fretting and changing into his pyjamas, before determining that he’d waited long enough and venturing the few feet from his own room to the next one, before venturing to try Sherlock’s door.

Which is unlocked, of course. Thank god.

Sherlock had known he would come. 

So he doesn’t attempt stealth. He simply shuts the door quietly behind himself, and crosses the room slowly, in the dark, fumbling, no help coming from Sherlock, until he reaches the oasis of the bed, stands next to it, his shin smarting from where he’d smacked into it.

Sherlock huffs and pulls back the covers. John can see just a little, by this point, just enough to see Sherlock move the covers, turned on his side facing the wall, facing away from John.

The bed is far too narrow for two grown men to curl up in with any sort of comfort.

That doesn’t deter John at all. He slips into the bed quickly, pulling the covers over himself, curling himself against Sherlock, molding himself to Sherlock’s back, draping an arm over him, and breathing a quiet sigh of relief against Sherlock’s shoulder. He relaxes for the first time in a week, and feels Sherlock gradually relax against him as well.

They get as comfortable as they can, smooshed together in the narrow bed.

“Big spoon,” John murmurs, and feels the huff of Sherlock’s answering chuckle. 

“Go to sleep, John,” he whispers back.

“Yes.” And John does.

\----

Sherlock is sat at the end of the bed when John wakes in the morning, looking at him with a horrified expression on his face.

“What?” John asks, groggy, still mostly asleep.

“What happened to your wall, John?”

John shrugs. He sits up and rubs his face. Sherlock’s mortification pricks at him, makes his shoulder rise in defense. His head pounds.

“It’s _gone_ , John.” 

_He must be shocked, he never states the obvious_ , John thinks. 

“Obviously,” he replies. “Could you please tone it down a bit? You’re making my headache worse.” He might whimper at the end of his plea.

Sherlock scrambles across the bed to John’s side--they barely fit, sat next to each other this way. John looks at him; Sherlock is wide-eyed, concern naked in his eyes. Sherlock, not afraid to let John know he’s concerned, that he cares. John tries to smile, but fears it comes off looking more like a grimace.

Sherlock reaches out and lays his hand gently against the back of John’s neck. A familiar, comforting gesture, but one that brings immediate relief this time.

Shocked at the immediate and pronounced difference, John slumps into him.

“Christ,” he breathes. “How--”

Sherlock shifts, arranges John against him so he’ll be more comfortable, so they’re still in contact, so they’re laying together in the bed instead of sitting, and lets go. The protection of Sherlock’s own honeycomb wall stays in place. 

“I’ve been practicing. You never noticed? Idiot,” he admonishes, fondly.

John has to take a deep breath, to keep from crying in relief. The headache fades considerably, though it doesn’t go away. The protection is a balm against his raw nerves, soothing and comforting.

“When?” John asks, murmurs really. Never fully awake, this comfort is lulling him quickly back to sleep, which he desperately needs anyway.

Not that Sherlock doesn’t after his own trying week.

“Mostly when you’re asleep,” Sherlock admits.

“Then how would I notice? Idiot.” It’s practically a term of endearment.

“Go back to sleep for a bit, John.”

“Mmm, yes. Sleep. You’ll stay?”

Sherlock nods against John’s head. They both drift back into sleep.

\----

Sherlock normally has next to zero patience for anyone or thing, but he surprises John over the next few days. When John isn’t sequestered for some test or another (the first day he spends identifying and pinpointing people in and around Baskerville via their emotional “flavor”, which he can do quite easily, though it makes him increasingly nervous), Sherlock is at his side. He doesn’t seem to be able to extend his shield to cover John as well unless they are in close proximity.

Sherlock doesn’t complain about it. He stays close to John and watches. he keeps his deductions to himself--mostly--and he even acts more or less civil to all and sundry. He smiles his fakest and most charming smiles, he asks seemingly innocent questions, he exudes an air of curiosity. Basically, he acts like someone else and enjoys every minute of it--up to a point.

If John didn’t know better, he’d think Sherlock had been cowed by the fact his brother had predicted his actions in coming here and prepared his people accordingly. But John does know better, and he’s pretty sure Sherlock is suppressing his normal actions and reactions for John’s sake. He’s still taking everything into that huge brain of his and filing it away. He’s still deducing, he’s just keeping his conclusions to himself (except at night, when Sherlock murmurs all of his observations and conclusions in John’s ear, until they both fall asleep).

It only lasts a few days, though. Sherlock, despite all his practicing, isn’t used to shielding for two, and it drains him; John can see it happening, his color fading, shadows growing beneath his eyes, his cheeks hollowing. Sherlock is no longer fighting sleep as he normally does by his second day in the facility, and his irritation with everyone except John is starting to show by the third. 

By dinner that evening, he’s fighting to stay awake through the meal; he merely picks at his food, too tired to do more than that.

“Sherlock, go to bed,” John instructs, shaking him out of his stupor. “I’m fine, I’ll be along shortly, go on.”

Sherlock blinks at him, slowly, and nods. He stumbles to his feet and wanders off. John lingers over his last cup of herbal tea before following.

\----

Sherlock is watching him again, when he wakes up the next morning. Watching him more closely than usual, even.

“What?”

Sherlock shakes his head. “Nothing. You’re going to be late.”

“You look awful, Sherlock,” John tells him, sitting up, reaching out to him. And he does, pale and worn out, shadows under his eyes and a slight tremor occasionally rolling up his spine, just enough to make him wince. 

Sherlock merely nods, bends forward until his forehead meets John’s sternum. John lays his hand against Sherlock’s neck and for a few minutes they sit together, in silence, before John moves his hand, and Sherlock leans back, and John gets out of the narrow bed.

“You should get some more sleep, Sherlock.”

Sherlock flops back in the bed, drapes his arm over his eyes, and doesn’t respond.

He’s asleep again by the time John leaves the room. John can feel the safety of being within Sherlock’s honeycomb wall fading with each step further away from him. Things had gone wonky the first day Sherlock had been in the facility, sticking close by, trying to keep John safe and within his sphere, overproctective. It had messed with everything, with John’s concentration, with the tests, with the results. Dr. Stapleton had given him a strange look at the end of the day, and asked him about his wall; he’d reassured her as much as he could, but he didn’t think she’d quite bought it. 

They’d talked it over that night, and agreed that Sherlock would only keep John close and share his shields when John wasn’t in testing. Or rather, John had insisted and Sherlock had finally acquiesced, after hours of arguing. 

\----

Sherlock is in the dining room when John appears at dinner, walking slowly, head bowed against the pain that has blossomed in his head. So many people, too many, too much.

They don’t talk, while John eats. Sherlock watches him, and John eats his food mechanically, slowly. Sherlock watches him and watches him, bleary eyed, but watching closely all the while. If John weren’t used to it, he’d be incredibly uncomfortable. Instead, he sits under it calmly and finishes his meal.

He gets up and leaves when he’s finished, heading towards his room, and a shower, and bed. Sherlock follows after a brief moment.

“You’re not really better, are you?” Sherlock asks, from behind him, as he’s digging through his meager possessions.

John snorts. “What gives you that idea?”

“I can see it, John.”

John turns around slowly.

“There are... chinks in you. Cracks. Why won’t you let me help?”

“You are helping, Sherlock,” John sighs.

“Not really. You don’t have to be strong enough for two, John. You know that, right?”

John sighs, and after a moment, turns to look at him. “Right.” He turns to leave the room.

“Where are you going?”

“I need--” He cuts himself off, takes a deep breath. “I need to think, Sherlock. I’m going to take a walk. I won’t be long, OK?”

Sherlock nods slowly, confusion writ across his face. He doesn’t try to stop John though. He doesn’t say anything at all.

“I’ll be back soon, really.” 

John tries not to look as though he’s fleeing the scene of a crime as he winds his way through the facility and out. He keeps going once he’s outside, and keeps going once he’s hit the moor.

\----

He walks and walks. And then he walks some more. It’s cool on the moor, and there’s a breeze blowing, and it’s too late by the time he realizes that he’s pretty hopelessly lost. The facility isn’t in sight any longer, and it’s growing dark fast.

Nothing about this trip, this study, has quite gone the way he thought it would. Putting himself through hell for a week, day in and day out, it’s not helping him. John doesn’t think it’s making him any worse, but he’s pretty sure it’s not making him any better. The only thing that’s going to make him better is time. Time and work and patience with himself, with his shortcomings and failings--something he has never had.

Sherlock will need to be patient with him as well; he will keep hurting his friend, he knows it. Even if he’s never complained, John knows that Sherlock feels it and hates it and wishes it would all go away. But it won’t unless they both work on it. Together.

John feels like something heavy and suffocating has lifted off his shoulders.

And now he’s lost and cold and it’s really fucking dark and he can hear something breathing nearby.

_Shit._ John falls into danger-mode, dropping into a crouch and peering into the darkness. He can’t see a bloody thing, but he hears the breathing thing coming closer.

The breathing comes closer, and closer still, and a great black shape looms up in front of him, blacker than the surrounding night, somehow, panting in his face and licking a long stripe up his cheek.

John laughs; it’s a dog. For a long minute he sits on the ground and just laughs while the dog pants in his face and tries to crawl into his lap. It’s way too big to fit, but John lets the beast do it while he thinks. It’s easier to do now, with that weight lifted from him. 

It’s possible. They can do this. _It’s time to go_ , he finally realizes. John stands and lets the dog lead him forward in the dark, which it does unerringly, to some sort of outcropping, into the shelter of which he crawls, the dog on his heels. The beast crawls right back into his lap when he settles and he lets it share warmth with him.

He’ll finish out the study; not because he really cares about Mycroft’s undoubted and still mysterious plans for him, but because he wants to know, and he wants to finish it. It’s only a few more days, and then they can head home. 

John settles in to wait for morning so he can head back for Baskerville.


End file.
